Saturday, April 9, 2016

No. 65 Jesus Redondo

First Prog: 13

Latest Prog: 1858
(and given that his previous was Prog 1204, it’s not impossible he may return
again one day)

Total appearances: 137

-including his work for Star
Lord, but not for The Eagle, and not including Monster
for Scream/Eagle. I hope you have your copy of the collection pre-ordered! (I'd
never even heard of this series before, but a combination or Alan Moore,
John Wagner and Jesus Redondo is not to be dismissed lightly)

Creator Credits:

Return to Armageddon

Mind Wars

Other art credits:

MACH One

Project Overkill

The Mind of Wolfie Smith

Timequake

Nemesis the Warlock

Rogue Trooper

Missionary Man

A lot of Future Shocks and one-offs, and, most recently, a 3riller

-and the second artist on the countdown
who has never drawn Dredd.

Notable character creations:

Amtrak

The Lakam twins from Mind Wars would be notable if the series
ever got a reprint (hint hint)

Redondo's work, especially on girls, is not a million miles from Ian Gibson.
Or is that the other way around?
Words by Alan Hebden

Notable characteristics:

I personally find
Redondo’s style is recognisable from some miles off, but I’m struggling to
condense it into words at this moment. He’s definitely fond of drawing creases
in people’s clothing. His people tend to be beautiful, except when they’re
hideously disfigured. He’s big on dramatic poses. It feels like he uses a lot
of pen/brush strokes. Often eschews panel borders, without sacrificing clarity
reading order (well, not usually), but making it bastard hard to sort out
panel-specific scans.

Sure, the reading order is obvious enough, but it's odd without panels and borders. What does it mean, Scott McCloud?
Words by Jack Adrian

He also likes to do this thing with a smudgy effect that probably has a techincal illustration name but I don;t know it. It's pretty cool, and can convey multiple ideas:

Smudges to show a psyhic breaking through to many minds at once.
Words by Alan Hebden

Smudges to show people trapped in a timeloop.
Words by Jack Adrian

Smudges to show horrifically thick swarms of flies.
Words by Pat Mills

On Jesus:

This isn’t relevant to
anything, but seeing his name in the credits box was the first time I knew that
people other than Mary’s boy child could be named Jesus. I have since learned
it’s pretty common in Latin America (not quite
as common as variants on Muhammad are in Muslim communities). Anyway, his art
came with high expectations of living up to a big name! It has never let me down.

I suspect Redondo had been working in comics a fair while, as his style
has been pretty set across his work for Tharg (and a certain Star Lord; no, not
that one). Redondo's first entries into the Prog were
on a decent handful of episodes of MACH 1. I wasn't born at the time it came
out, but I fondly recall his version of John Probe from reading it as an
impressionable 14-year-old*. Something about the way he drew flared trousers,
and the general swingin' vibe of Probe as he coolly dispatches foes with
generous helpings of violence. Or just stands around in his pants looking sexy.

Dig those flares, man!
Words by Nick Allen

Master of the flying kick
Context by Nick Allen

2000AD's pre-Slaine hunk of the month
Words by Pat Mills

It'd all be
perfectly at home in a Bond movie. A Daniel Craig one, even.

Moving on,
Redondo really came to prominence not on 2000AD, but on StarLord's opening
strip, Mind Wars. Overally, StarLord's legacy will always be Strontium
Dog and Ro-Busters**, but Mind Wars was equally good if you
ask me. It was just a different beast – a standalone epic that came to an end
within the pages of the comic, so couldn't have transferred to 2000AD even if
anyone had wanted it to. It was certinaly streets ahead of two other
self-contained 'epics' that ran concurrently in 2000AD: Colony Earth and
Death Planet.

Look at those sad eyes. He's not aiming for camp.
Words by Alan Hebden

Redondo
himself was a big part of that. Clearly a seasoned pro, he seemed to have it
all worked out, from character design, to spaceship design, to alien worlds and
space battles. In classic space opera fashion, physics be damned. There are
sharp-banking spaceships, laser beams and explosive engines all over the shop. And somehow, it was all played straight and serious - but it really worked.

Then Redondo immediately proved he could do Earth-bound stories to, being tapped to take
over from Ian Gibson on Project Overkill, and then from Gibson again (via series creator Vanyo) on the second big Wolfie Smith serial to
run in 2000AD. Overkill provided relatively contemporary action thrills a la M.A.C.H. One.

Wolfie Smith was a more varied assignment. I've said it before on this blog, but I do think a trick was missed not further exploring a character who is less and anti-hero, more an anti-villain. I mean, he has the charm and superpowers of a horrible person, but somehow gets caught up in the sort of scrapes that mean he ends up doing good, rather than evil. But Wolfie IS evil. I know because Jesus Redondo showed me.

Exhibit A: this is Wolfie daydreaming about what he wants out of life.
Context by Tom Tully

Exhibit B: Wolfie takes out some perfectly innocent security guards. Sure, he's being forced to do it, but look at the fiery delight in his eyes!
Words by Tom Tully

His time on Wolfie Smith also featured what would become a Redondo mainstay: a
character with a hideously deformed face, mangled by fire and/or who knows what
else. It's the best of 1980s gooey horror in comic-strip form. The dude would
do an epic Freddy Krueger, I'm telling you.

I can't now if they ever explained why cheap villain Kramer had the face he did.
Words by Tom Tully

By this
time, Redondo was a regular fixture in the Prog, burning brightly for the next
few years. Following Wolfie Smith were two more extended runs, first on
the epicly epic Return to Armageddon, which is just a ton of fun, and
then on Nemesis the Warlock Book II, keeping the story going while
series co-creator Kevin O'Neill slaved away on Book III.

But really,
in my mind, this is the time when Redondo became king of the Future Shock,
the Time Twister, and the one-off. His work one these tales, like
contemporary Mike White, was never show-y off-y, but always suited the story.
Such stories often don't afford the space to develop characters beyond a basic
minimum, but Redondo can deliver the inquisitive professor, the bewildered
bystander, the naughty boy who grows up to be Genghis Khan.

There's that cross-hatching effect Redondo brings out for the more serious, emotional panels.
Words by Alan Moore

More smudging, along with a scene-setting mist.
Words by Kelvin Gosnell

Debauchery as you like it: beer, beards and boobs.
Words by Steve Moore

Such great face work: the angry company man, the amused mother, the horrible brat.
Words by Chris Lowder

Relaxing into another panel showing a burn victim.
Words by Alan Moore

And of
course that's where the man has been seen most recently, delivering a Terror Tale and a full-colour 3riller, complete with dead men as
protagonists. He's lost none of his charm, nor his love of drawing the folds in
clothing.

Art by Jesus Redondo: Still instantly recognisable decades later
Words by Robert Murphy

Back to the
epics, where characters really do have room to grow. Nemesis Book II is
arguably not really Nemesis's story at all – it's about Brother Baruda, the
faithful terminator who escapes from an alien PoW camp. He's all muscles and
snarls and no compromises. Redondo also does well by Purity Brown, another
mainstay of Book II. But his Nemesis himself, sadly, doesn't ever quite capture
the gnarliness of the menace of O'Neill's version.

I always liked the way the logo for Book II matched the new art style.
And this cover shows a solid action-hero Nemesis, too.

Return to
Armageddon is the real deal, of course, the 2000AD story for which Redondo will
likely always be most remembered. It's been collected into a proper trade
fairly recently, which is about the only evidence I have that plenty of other
people (besides me) love this story. It's pretty weird, and by the end is
guilty of a certain amount of cliché – but it's the sort of cliché that fits
perfectly into the ethos of 2000AD, as a Sci-Fi adventure comic, so I'm not
complaining.

Is he a demon, or a lovely little boy?
Context by Malcolm Shaw

Now that's what I call a hideous facial disfigurement.
Words by Malcolm Shaw

But before
it gets there, you get a changing cast of characters, including surly space
pirates and a sort of benevolent robot who have all stepped right out of Star
Wars. Who meet a hideously disfigured man in constant pain, who can't die –
something entirely unlike Star Wars, but very 2000ADish. Then a bit of
planet hopping, a girl, a demon, and, as promised in the title, some actual
apocalyptic armageddon action!

*Somehow, I
managed to amass an entire run of back progs at that time, and so began my
first (and so far only) big re-read, a sacred duty to 2000AD fans that may as
well count as a version of Hajj – something everyone should do, but only if
they have the means to do it. I only had to read 900 Progs when I did it; I'm
fairly daunted by the thought of tackling it again for a full 2,000 progs! Especially
now that I know how much better a lot of later strips read in the collected
editions.

**Strontium
Dog was practically perfect form the very beginning; Ro-Busters, not
so much. If it hadn't been for the early bits by Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill, I'm
not convinced this was an obvious candidate for future greatness.

I loved Jesus' work. And I love the fact that 2000AD gave older artists like him and Massimo Bellardinelli and Ron Smith the chance to let their imaginations run riot. Also I think the fact that they had artists like Jesus who could be relied on to turn in consistently excellent work at speed allowed them to indulge younger talents like Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill, Brett Ewins etc who were clearly learning on the job.